Garie Beach

How British is Australian culture?

As an avid Argentine tourist I plan on visiting Australia in two months. One of my friends told me that Australian culture is very British. He said that Australians use almost the exact same words that the British use with a few ideosyncratic Australianisms here and there. He also mentioned that they tend to engage in similar activities such as rugby, cricket, beer drinking, self-deprecating humour, golf, etc. Another opinion that my friend has of Australia is that it is like a British society built in a hot dry land with beaches. So, how British is Australia?

Public Comments

1. some one answer this I want to know as well
2. Your friend is partially correct. But Australians are a lot less "British" than they were 50 years ago. Few of us care much for Association Football, boring, boring, boring. We have better houses, better cars, longer distances and better weather.
3. We are our own country and have our own culture. Come here and visit for yourself. Every city has different cultures. We are home to many many many different nationalities and our cultures are intertwined to create Australia. Australians love sport in general, we do love a drink or two and we don't take ourselves to seriously.
4. Australia is a multicultural country everyone is welcome here. We have our own culture which is very laid back and down to earth, we work hard and play hard, we take people as we find them and are not pompous in any way.
5. I would say that Australia is more then just British, granted that the majority of the people that moved to Australia were British but there were also people from other parts of Europe like Spain, Italy, Greece, People from the middle East and Asia that moved here too. We do retain a lot of our English heritage but we also have assimilated into our culture aspects that come from other parts of Europe as well as Asia and the Middle East also America as well. If you only look at a surface view of Australia you might think that Australia is still only British and nothing else but if you look deeper you will see that Australia has evolved well past what we were.
6. The dynamics have shifted dramatically here in the last 30 years & although English is the national language & we have the British parliamentary system our society is much more open & diverse these days. Culturally we have a very cosmopolitan society & have embraced the advantages that come along with that....cuisine being the most noticeable ! I'd like to think that our country has adopted the finer points of every culture that has sent representatives here.. Come & enjoy...
7. I moved from the UK to Australia in July 2007 and on the surface Australia does seem very British but it's not. It does have it's own culture, and quirks in the language too. I find the Aussies to be far more friendly than the Brits, which is one of the reasons we moved out here. They are absolutely sports mad here - even more so than in the UK! I think that the government system seems to be more like the USA rather than the UK. Aussies do customer service a lot better than the Brits do, and of course there is the fantastic weather! We came for a visit and decided to move over here permanently - beware that it could happen to you too :-)